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Pinpointing the Exact Line Where A Crash Occurs in VB6 or VBA

Whether you're writing Microsoft Access or Visual Basic
applications, a comprehensive error handling architecture is critical to
a professional solution. Error handling in your VB6/VBA code lets you
trap unexpected errors and gracefully exit your application without
causing an end user to suffer an unhandled crash on their own.

Ideally, your error handler documents what went wrong so that you can diagnose the problem and quickly fix it.

Since we've created applications in use by customers
around the world, and cannot physically visit them to deal with issues,
we've created a very robust error handling architecture to best address
unexpected behavior with the goal of taking care of customers and constantly improving our products.

One of the most important parts of this is documenting
the line where a crash occurs. By knowing the error message and
offending line, one can often determine the problem without asking the
user for more information. Information the user may no longer remember or recall accurately.

Simple things like, "Oh, that's where I need to trap for
Null", or "That's where division by zero happened" are addressed by knowing this basic information.

It also makes it clear that the developer is at fault -- not the user -- which can be half the battle (and I speak from
experience as a developer who has never but still thinks he can write bug free code).

Error Object

Err.Number the error number (useful if users are in another language).

With the Error object, you can usually understand what
the error is. That's a start. Unfortunately, it does not reveal the
module or procedure name, which needs to be handled manually but is beyond the scope of this tip.

ERL Function

Less well-known is the ERL function which gives you the
line number where an error occurs. Most developers don't use this
because this function returns 0 if the crashing line isn't numbered.

The trick is to number all your lines before you deploy
your application to your users. If you do that, the ERL function
identifies exactly where a crash occurs:

In the silly example above all the dblNum equations
crash because of division by zero. The Rnd function gives a random
number between 0 and 1, and based on the value dies on one of the lines
in the Select Case statement. The ERL function identifies which line and
displays a message box:

In this case, the value was 0.57, and we see it dies in the section <
0.6.

Obviously, this is just an example of how ERL works. In a real
application, we'd have a global error handler invoked in the PROC_ERR
section, where the error information would be written to a file along
with any other information about the environment.

Adding Line Numbers to Code

As for adding line numbers to code, we do that after
we've finished writing our application as one step in our delivery
process (we don't write code with line numbers). Other delivery steps
include emptying temporary tables, resetting default values, setting the
version number, etc.

We use our
Total Visual
CodeTools product to apply the line numbering. It's part of its
Code
Delivery feature
and is one of the most important steps we take to build quality into our
applications. Its New Procedure Builder is also very helpful for
creating procedures with the error handling and commenting structure we
like. Finally, its Code Cleanup feature lets us apply our error handling
to all procedures that lack error trapping which is great for taking
over an existing application.

The use of line numbers and ERL have been critical to
resolving many obscure issues and improving our products over time.

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Additional Resources

Here are some additional resources that may help you create faster Access databases and/or create them in less time:

Automated Database Analysis for Best Practices

For automated analysis of your databases,
check out our Total Access Analyzer program which is designed to examine
every object in your database in detail, provide documentation to help you understand what's
in it, how the objects interact, and offer suggestions for
applying Microsoft Access
Best Practices. It finds hundreds of types of errors, suggestions, and
performance tips specific to your database objects.

Microsoft Access Source Code Library

Why write all the code yourself? Get our Total Visual SourceBook code
library with 100,000+ royalty-free lines of code you can insert into your
Access, Office and VB6 projects. Written exclusively for this professional
code library, there's code you won't find anywhere else. More info on
Microsoft Access code.

Simplify Writing, Taking Over, and Delivering VBA Module Code

If you want to write better VBA code and do it in less time, learn about
our Total Visual CodeTools program which works with Access, Office, and
VB6. Total Visual CodeTools includes code builders, tools to standardize
existing code (indentations, variable names, adds error handling, etc.), and
tools for you to deliver more robust solutions. Learn more about our
Microsoft Access coding tools.

Microsoft Access Consulting Services

FMS also offers custom software development services. If you're in over
your head or just don't have time, contact our team to see how we can help
you maintain, enhance, speed up and/or migrate your Microsoft Access applications.